


Lighting the Fuses and Counting to Three

by MizGoat



Series: Like the Air You Breathe [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Blow Jobs, Explicit Sexual Content, Frottage, M/M, Shower Sex, Writer has a bit of a potty mouth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-20
Updated: 2013-01-20
Packaged: 2017-11-26 04:28:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/646570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MizGoat/pseuds/MizGoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean Winchester may have been rescued by a man of the mysterious species humanity has nicknamed Angels, but he can't feel at ease about it. He knows his luck isn't that good. The Angel's spaceship crashing is more like the sort of thing that happens to him. Still perhaps there are worse things than getting stranded with a good looking alien.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lighting the Fuses and Counting to Three

With a start Dean realized that the left sleeve of his jacket was smoldering and furiously patted it out. As the ringing in his ears began to fade, he became aware of the odd popping sound of metal cooling behind him.

  
“Cas, I gotta say, your ship sucks.” he told the bemused looking man next to him. He leaned forward and braced his hands on his thighs. Adrenaline had loaned him the energy to escape near death when they had had to execute an emergency landing, but now imminent danger had passed, and the marker was coming due.  
  
“It should not have done that” The other man commented in a surprisingly level tone.  
  
“Oh, so Angel spaceships don’t blow right the fuck up by design when someone tries to program coordinates. Your’s was just acting up a little.”  
  
“There is no call for shouting.”  
  
“I’m not shouting,” he responded indignantly, but as the ringing in Dean’s ears had faded a little further, he realized he had, perhaps, been overcompensating his volume a bit when he spoke earlier.  
  
“Someone must have tampered with my ship while I was rescuing you.” The angel’s gruff voice sounded certain, but his brow was furrowed and his gaze is lost somewhere in the middle distance. Of course nothing about Castiel the Angel made any damn sense, so why should he start now.  
  
Dean knew about as much as anyone about Angels, which was to say, not a whole lot. They had been the first alien race that mankind had encountered once they had managed the trick of interstellar travel. Humanity had been collectively peeing itself with excitement and the Angels treated it as something that was perhaps mildly more interesting than that day’s weather reports. Partly cloudy, chance of showers in the evening, and a previously unknown alien race arriving at seven tonight, back to you, Janet. After meeting a few other races, humans had realized that it wasn’t them. Angels simply did not care about anyone but themselves.  
  
They had also realized that there was a very good chance that the Angels were the most advanced race in the galaxy, and that it was a nearly uniformly held belief among the many and varied forms of intelligent life that it was a good thing Angels didn’t want anything to do with much outside the four planets that circled their home star. Of those planets, they only allowed visitors to come to the outermost one, called Gateway, though no one was ever allowed beyond it. The other three were fiercely guarded with the sorts of weapons that could reduce a starship the size of a small moon to vapor with a single shot, and even the most war loving folks out there in the big, black, and empty tended to avoid that sort of thing. Sanctioned visitors to the outermost planet only saw angels once they had used shape shifting technology to alter their form. No one knew what angels actually looked like. According to the Angels, this was for the visitor’s own protection.  
  
Hell, no one even knew what they were properly called. Angels made themselves look different for different races, though for whatever messed up reason they tended to look like the species they were communicating plus a pair of wings. When humans asked them what they called themselves, the response had been that that was sacred and secret knowledge, but that they could be called whatever humans found fitting. Because they looked like the mythical creature to humans, they called them Angels. Other races had other names, most of which translated into some of the most fluent and beautiful cussing that Dean had ever heard.  
  
And that was Angels in a nutshell, really. Powerful, secretive, and self-absorbed. Except there was one more fact about Angels. It was the kind of fact people ignored, because it was the sort of fact that could crawl in your gut and destroy you if you thought about it for too long.  
  
The Angels had a plan for the universe.  
  
Every now and then Angels would reach outside their little solar system and change something. Keep a building from being built, introduce two people, or lead a ship that had made a bad jump back to it’s intended destination. Once they had even moved an entire mountain to the opposite side of a planet. And if you tried asking them why, they would simply say that it had to be done, and everyone involved would feel a little cheap and used like pieces on some stupid Angel chess board. No one dared say as much to the Angels though. They had big ass guns and they could move mountains around like it was nothing because they felt like it. You didn’t argue with people who could bring that kind of power to the table. Far better to focus on things you had a chance of actually doing something about, like figuring out if the race of aliens you had just met that thought your livers were fine dining could actually be reasoned with, or if you should just shoot them and move on with it. The universe was full of problems like that, so you never had to work at finding something other than what the Angelic plan was to worry about.  
  
But, now Castiel had rescued him from the worst prison the galaxy had invented. Dean had spent the last several hours trying to get his head around how that could possibly in any way advance the angelic plan, and was still drawing a blank. All he knew is that, grateful as he was to be free, he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Life didn’t have get out of jail free cards.  
  
Of course Castiel himself was a puzzle as well. With his messy hair and his large, rumpled tan trenchcoat he only thing that kept the angel from looking like the same sort of vagabond drifter Dean might encounter in any of the run down little haunts his job had him frequent were the large, glossy black wings that protruded from the angel’s back. Well, that, and his obscenely blue eyes that seemed to take in everything around him with a mild confusion. It wasn’t what Dean had figured angel’s would be like. He couldn’t really pin down what he thought angels would be like, but Cas was not it.  
  
“So, now what, Kimosabe?” There was a long, awkward pause before Dean added, “What’s the plan?”  
  
“I... I am uncertain.” Again the angel’s voice was level, but the crease in his brow had furrowed a little deeper. “It had not occurred to me that the ship might malfunction so completely. I lack a contingency plan.”  
  
“Well isn’t this just peachy. You lot have some of the scariest goddamn tech in the galaxy, but one little hiccup and everything goes to pot. Can’t you just zap us away like you did on Helheim?”  
  
“I lack sufficient energy for another transfer of that magnitude.”  Castiel looked down at the upturned palms of his hands like maybe it was their fault.  
  
By now a small gathering of the planet’s natives had drawn around to watch them, apparently attracted by the explosion. A quick glance reassured Dean that they were safe. This was an Ostraylkayn planet they had crashed on to, and aside from having a difficult to pronounce name, they were chiefly harmless. They looked a bit like the unholy mating of a lobster and an iguana, but they were vegetarians and got by largely by signing a profusion of non-aggression treaties and doing brisk trade in preserved vegetables. He was also pretty sure they slept in beds. There were worse places to get stranded.  
  
“Alright, screw the magic tech. This is what we are going to do. We are going to find the scrap man. There’s bound to be one. We are going to get as much money from that heap of junk formerly known as a spaceship as we can. We use the cash to place a call to get a ride home, and we use the rest to hole up somewhere until our ride shows up.” It probably wasn’t advisable to boss an angel around, but Castiel nodded solemnly. And there was something in those strange blue eyes just then that made Dean’s breath catch in his throat. Sadness, and also perhaps just a touch of relief.  


* * *

  
  
It would figure that the chitinous bastards would want to haggle all day. It had taken hours to get a fair price for the scrap metal. Then of course it would be harvest season and the bulk of the local hostelry would be booked full of migrant workers. He had finally found one with a free room that the desk clerk had called something that his translator nanites had unhelpfully rendered “bijou.” Looking at the room Dean could only assume that “bijou” was rat bastard bug-lizard for room so small two grown human shaped beings will not be able to avoid tripping over each other and where only a narrow area near the door has a roof tall enough to stand upright.  
  
And through all the haggling and room hunting, Cas had just followed him around like a lost puppy. At first he had tried to help, but as that had led largely to inadvertently pissing off the Ostraylkayn, eventually Dean had told him to let him do all the talking. It was stunning in a way, to see someone of a race held in such cautious reverence so helpless in simple tasks like understanding how to find a hotel room.  
  
Castiel also had a habit of standing just a little closer than Dean would normally consider socially acceptable. His first attempt to explain the concept of personal space had either not been understood or ignored and he hadn’t had the energy to attempt a second. There were worse things than having a good looking humanoid male hanging close to you.  
  
And Cas was good looking. He hadn’t picked up on it at first. He had been too busy getting frog walked out of a prison cell he was too weak to leave under his own steam, or being zapped to environs unknown, or being miraculously healed, or avoiding being blown to smithereens when the warning sirens in the Angel’s ship had started to flare, to be aware of much more than the fact that the angel’s eyes were a vibrant shade of blue and that he had shit clothes. But when the Ostraylkayn had left them alone for a few moments while conspiring about how much the wreckage was worth, Dean had had time to look. His clothes might look like he had acquired them at a rough second hand shop, but Cas’s dark brown messy hair caught the light in interesting ways, as did his wings, which took an almost iridescent quality with green and purple shimmers. Almost like an oil spill, he thought and, then chided himself for comparing the lovely wings to something so base. It was all pointless anyway, he figured. For all he knew the Angel was junkless. At any rate the odds of him being attracted to Dean had to be pretty slim.  
  
Right now he was examining the room’s only bed with a mixture of confusion and mild revulsion. It reminded Dean of the bed his brother Sam had gotten for the dog he had managed to sneak aboard just before one of the longer trips their father had hauled them on as children. It was oval shaped and had little padded walls around the edges.  
  
“We will sleep on this?” Cas asked sounding a little incredulous. Dean shrugged. After a year on Helheim, he wasn’t gonna turn up a bed just because it was a little funny shaped.  
  
“Will we both fit?” Perhaps the little crease between the Angel’s brows was actually a permanent feature of his face. Dean wasn’t certain now that he had ever seen the angel without it. It was weirdly endearing.  
  
“That’s the fifty-million dollar question isn’t it?” he conceded. They would probably fit if they weren’t too prudish about it, he reasoned, but the bed was small. A few thoughts of what it might be like sleeping pressed close to the attractive body of the the Angel flitted unbidden to his mind.  
  
“I’m gonna take a shower,” he stated abruptly and turned quickly into the attached bathroom and closed the door behind him.  
  
The shower, as it turns out, was the first pleasant surprise Dean had had since he found out the reason that he had been pulled from his cell was that he was being released. It was positively huge and had several different jets that sprayed in a number of directions. There was a distinct possibility that the bathroom was larger than the bedroom. Apparently the bug-lizards might be willing to sleep in a tiny hovel, but they wouldn’t compromise on a good shower. The only trouble seemed to be that there was no soap, but even just hosing off felt good. As the hot water streamed over his body something tight inside himself unwound. With a little sigh he leaned against the wall of the shower and closed his eyes. He was tired, and for the moment at least, he could just let himself be tired. There was no act to perform now.  
  
This was, he reflected, the only one of items he had sworn he would do right off the bat once he got out of jail that he would actually do. The list wasn’t really that long. He hadn’t actually thought he would ever leave Helheim, so he had tried not to spend too much time on pointless hope. The rest of the list had either involved Sam, large quantities of alcohol, steak served rare, or a willing woman and a large bed. Still the hot shower was a rare treat. It wasn’t every planet that had enough fresh water for such luxury.  
  
His reverie was short lived however. Before he was quite aware of what was happening, he heard the bathroom door open, and then Castiel was standing in front of him, fully clothed in the shower.  
  
“Cas, what the hell!” he cried with his voice taking a decided turn for the squeaky.  
  
“Dean, I do not think the ship was sabotaged.” Cas was mere inches away from him and was staring intently into his eyes. Dean tried to shrink back into a corner of the shower, but it was a tight fit with both of them in there. Cas’s wings took up an inordinate amount of space.  
  
“That’s great dude. Why don’t you tell me all about it after...”  
  
“I think it self destructed because my genetic code was corrupted too far to pass the security protocols.” The Angel’s voice wavered slightly. That was new.  
  
“Ok, not sure why you had to break in on my shower to tell me that. This is supposed to be kind of a private thing. If you could just...”  
  
“If you would let me finish.” Cas was irritated? For the first time he broke eye contact and stared down at a point somewhere near Dean’s feet. At least he was assuming it was his feet. The idea that the angel had decided to check him out was not one he was going to entertain at the moment, thank you.  
  
“I believe there must have been some transference of genetic material between us when I transported you.”  
  
Dean opened his mouth to ask how that was possible, but then closed it with the question unasked. A few instantaneous transfer methods had been described to him once in one of his brief stints in school. Though all were perfectly safe, none of them bared thinking about too hard if you liked being able to sleep.  
  
Cas reached up and brushed his left bicep with the tips of his fingers, and Dean flinched at the unexpected contact. The other man withdrew his hand as though it had been burned. Dean turned to look at the arm in question and hissed as he realized what had caught the angel’s attention. There was a large raised scar in the shape of a handprint. He must have missed it in his haste to shuck his clothes off and get under the running water.  
  
“The hell is that?” he howled at the other man, knowing full well that was where Castiel had grabbed him when the prison warden had made noises like maybe he wasn’t going to release Dean after all. Then they had been on inside Cas’s ship, and a few terror inducing minutes later, crash landed on this planet in the back of beyond.  
  
“I have been exiled.” Cas murmured, heedless of Dean's dilemma about the scar. He wasn’t the most emotive of speakers at the best of times, and Dean figured he probably only noted the anguish present in those words because he was inches away from the angel’s face. For a moment he forgot that he was naked and that the angel had joined him in the shower wearing a trenchcoat.  
  
“Why the fuck would you be exiled? Didn’t you come rescue me all according to plan or whatever?”  
  
“And in doing so, I became impure. Unworthy of return. I must remain in the world. I cannot return home.” Dean felt something foreign brush against his toes. Glancing downward, he realized that the angel had even left his shoes on and was now unconsciously dragging a foot back and forth.  
  
“And you know this because your ship blew up? Cas that’s bullshit. Sometimes shit just happens.”  
  
“The ship did not malfunction until I set the coordinates for Gateway.” Castiel paused and his tongue darted quickly over his slightly chapped lips, snapping Dean pack into vivid awareness that he was naked with the gorgeous man inches away. The shower had soaked through the trench coat and where the coat opened in front he could see the angel’s white shirt turning translucent and clinging to the flat planes of Cas’s chest. _Damnit._  
  
“And I cannot feel the rest of the host. I have always been able to sense my brothers and sisters, but since I brought you away, all I can feel is...” there was an achingly long pause and Dean felt something brush against the top of his thigh and his cock. With a twitch, he looked down to see that it was the edge of Cas’s trenchcoat.  
  
“You, Dean.” The Angel was looking him straight in the eye and, his gravely voice sent an electric thrill down his spine. Dean’s mind lit up in a profusion of curse words as he struggled to pull together enough coherent thought to figure out what the hell he was doing.  
  
And then Cas kissed him and, the battle for coherent thought was surrendered.  
  
Before he was even really aware of what he was doing Dean had his hands on either side of Cas’s head and was pulling him closer to get more leverage on the kiss. And then his lips parted and his tongue was exploring the other man’s mouth. Hesitantly at first, and then with greater enthusiasm Cas returned the favor. Little shit was a quick study.  
  
Sanity returned with the inevitable need to come up for air.  
  
“This has got to be a bad idea,” Dean said, but his hands were pushing back deeper into the dark brown hair of the Angel. It looked almost black now that it was wet.  
  
“Why?” It took a moment to realize that this was a genuine question, not an attempt to be coy. Cas probably couldn’t be coy. He was an embodiment of earnest intention.  
  
And right now that earnest intention was running his fingertips along the line of Dean’s collarbone. And he had raised his wings and spread them slightly so that they formed a sort of barrier in the little corner of the shower Dean had backed into, almost like he was shielding Dean from the rest of the world. That was new. Dean was always the protective one. This was uncharted territory. Incredibly erotic uncharted territory.  
  
“You’re an angel. There has to be some sort of rule against this.” Dean was saying, but his hands had busied themselves with groping around Castiel’s back trying to sort out the clasps under the slits in the coat that allowed the angels wings out. _Worse than bra straps_ , some last little semblance of critical self awareness chimed in.  
  
“Not really, not anymore,” Cas’s words were little more than a sigh. “I am willing. You seem,” he swallowed hard, and glanced meaningfully downward, “desirous.”  
  
“Cas,” Dean murmured. He had figured out the clasps at last and was sliding his hands under the trenchcoat and pushing it downward.  
  
“Hmn?” Cas had rested his head on his shoulder and his mouth was close enough to his neck that he felt the vibrations of the hummed response.  
  
“You are wearing far too much clothing.”  
  
“Oh!” Cas backed up too quickly for Dean’s taste leaving a cool spot where he had been. Then after a few moments of comically futile struggling with the wet clothes that clung to his skin at every turn, he hobbled sideways out of the shower to get a wider range of movement.  
  
In the awkward silence Dean’s thoughts managed to catch up with him. This was a bad idea. There was no way the Angel just wanted sex. There was a catch hidden somewhere. There was a price to paid.  
  
Then Castiel was back in the shower with him and this time he was naked, and Dean figured whatever the price was he would pay it. Consequences be damned, it was too long since he last felt someone touch him like this.  
  
As the angel shimmied in closer and placed his hands on Dean’s shoulders, Dean slipped his own hands around the narrow waist of his companion and pulled forward. Both men let out grunts of satisfaction as their erections pressed together, trapped between their stomachs.  
  
Cas leaned forward and put his head back on Dean’s shoulder, and again he lifted his wings to cut them off from anything that wasn’t their little corner of the shower. The wet feathers hung a little more lank and less full and beautiful. Acting on impulse Dean reached up and ran his hand along the top of one, enjoying the slick feel of them sliding under his fingertips. Cas responded by arching his back which served both to thrust his hips harder against Dean’s pelvis and lift the wing into Dean’s hand.  
  
“I take it you like that,” Dean whispered craning his head around so that his lips brushed against Castiel’s ear.  
  
“Yes,” Castiel stated. His blunt tone brought forth a low chuckle from the other man. Cas startled a little, but as Dean kept stroking his wing with one hand and with the other reached down to cup his ass Cas seemed to take a little encouragement.  
  
“I like the way you touch me. I like how it feels to be pressed close to you like this.” They sounded more like facts read from a textbook than bedroom talk, but Dean wasn’t complaining. He hadn’t been complimented in a long damn while and it felt surprisingly pleasant.  
  
“I like the way you kiss.” This last one had such a hopeful note in it that Dean felt compelled to leave off biting and licking at the edges of Cas’s ear and return to his mouth. Cas kissed back with gusto, and twisted his arms around Dean’s neck.  
  
It took a little doing with the Angel being so clingy, but Dean managed to pull their hips apart enough to get his hand between them. Cas protested, making little fussy noises into Dean’s mouth until the hand wriggling between them was able to accomplish its goal and wrap itself firmly around both cocks. Cas broke the kiss, sucked in air hard, and turned his head down to see what was being done, resting his forehead against the other man’s sternum.  
  
Dean bent forward and inhaled deeply from Cas’s hair. God in heaven, Cas even smelled good. Warm and spicy, a little like cinnamon.  
  
He kept his face buried in the mussy brown-black hair as he began to slowly pump their dicks together. When he felt the feather light touch of Castiel slowly tracing the line of a tendon in his hand from his wrist to the tip of his index finger he all but howled with need. He had been holding lightly on to one of Cas’s wings, but he had to shift his grip to Cas’s shoulder when his knees threatened to give out as he picked the pace up a little.  
  
And then Cas had quit toying with his fingers and had joined him in sliding his hand over their throbbing cocks and pushed Dean past the point of no return. His hips began to jerk spasticity upward in a series of rapid, shallow thrusts. He didn’t cry out as he came, just let out a series of rough, panting gasps. The thick white evidence of his passion had no sooner left his body than the shower had washed it away.  
  
Then of course Dean’s knees really had given out, and he slid slowly down to kneel on the cool stone floor of the shower. Which, of course, put him eye to eye, so to speak, with Cas’s dripping, twitching dick. Before he had time to chide himself about how he had wanted to make the Angel cum first, he wrapped his hand back around the base of the cock and started to lick at the head.  
  
“Dean,” the Angel drew out the single syllable of his name into a carnal moan as Dean switched from licking to sucking his cock. Dean hummed appreciatively and Cas bucked his hips a little at the new sensation. Lazily he closed his eyes and just let himself focus on the wonderful noises Cas was making and sensuous feel of the cock on his tongue as he slid his mouth over it. The warm water raining down on him from the shower was a nice touch too, he thought absent mindedly.  
  
It didn’t last long. Cas started to sputter his name and Dean backed his mouth off until just the tip of Cas’s prick was inside, letting his hand take over. He was a little relieved that Cas’s jizz tasted like regular, old human sperm. The same salty, bitter, not quite pleasant taste he remembered from the distant past when he had last been with a man. But the look of awe and wonder that radiated from the angel’s fierce blue eyes when he looked up to greet them was completely unique to the Angel.  


* * *

  
Later that night, as he lay tangled in the Angel’s limbs on the bed that really, probably was just a bit too small for comfort, Dean realized he was humming to himself. Cas had already dozed off, and while Dean was bone tired, he didn’t seem able to sleep just yet. The song was an ancient one his mom had always liked and that he hadn’t thought about in years.  
  
“Blind boys and gamblers, they invented the blues.”  
  
He sang the few bars softly. Tomorrow, he thought, this will all come crashing in. Escaping Helheim, making love to the Angel, he knew that this sort of good luck couldn’t hold. But tonight he couldn’t quite bring himself to care. Cas was warm and his damp wing that was draped over Dean’s chest felt nice. And for now, that could be enough.  
  
“And what are the choices for those who remain?  
The sign of the cross on a runaway train.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fanfic in about a billion years (I was in high school, Gundam Wing was what all the cool kids were writing slash fics about). I apologize if I'm a little rusty. This is, however, more likely than not the first of a series. I like this setting to much to only write about one tiny backwater planet. I have several ideas percolating. I also have no beta reader, so all mistakes are my own and will be cheerfully corrected if pointed out.
> 
> A few acknowledgments: John Scalzi's Old Man's War and Isaac Asimov's Second Foundation were both on my mind when I came up with the setting. The "bijou" hotel room comment is lovingly lifted from the movie The Matchmaker.
> 
> The song Dean is singing bits of at the end is Runaway Train by Rosanne Cash. It's lyrics are also the source of my title. I had it stuck in my head while writing the sexy bits.
> 
> If you wanna listen to it, plus the other songs I use for fic titles I have made a mix: [Listen Here](http://8tracks.com/mizgoat/fic-writing)


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